Operational planning for commercial airline flights typically begins days to months in advance, anticipating demand, future traffic congestion, weather and other considerations. In the United States, for example, the operational planning function is generally conducted by an airline's Airline Operations Control (AOC) center. In parallel, Air Traffic Control (ATC) has its own set of services and functions. ATC manages aviation traffic in a block of airspace on behalf of a country or region, and is often a governmental organization. Airspace configuration and management begins days to months in advance of an actual flight, taking into consideration anticipated demand, probable congestion points due to weather or traffic, and other constraints.
For example, FIG. 1 shows airline and air traffic control operating environment 50 in accordance with the prior art. The environment 50 includes an airline operations portion 51 (typically performed by the AOC center), and an air traffic control portion 60 (typically performed by ATC). During a look-ahead period 70 (e.g. approximately 1 month to 12 hours), an airspace management component 62 and a system flow management component 64 of the air traffic control portion 60 perform long-term, pre-flight planning operations. These operations are performed in parallel to, and semi-coordinated with strategic flight planning component 52 of the airline operations portion 51, typically performed by an airline's AOC.
Working in a collaborative manner with airlines and other system users, ATC is responsible for overall air traffic management. This high level, strategic national process becomes a more tactical regional traffic management process closer to the actual time of operation. More specifically, as shown in FIG. 1, during look-ahead period 72 (e.g. approximately 12 hours to 20 minutes), a regional traffic management unit 66 of the air traffic control portion 60 performs intermediate-term planning and air traffic management operations. These operations are conducted in parallel to an AOC preflight/in-flight operations component 54 of the airline operations portion 51. In this time window the airline's Operations Center is primarily in a reactive mode, responding to system dynamics and perturbations which would otherwise have an adverse effect on planned operations (i.e. airline schedule). This function is referenced here as “Reactive Perturbation Management” 56.
As shown in FIG. 1, during look-ahead period 74 (e.g. approximately 20 minutes out), a flight component 58 of the airline operations portion 51 operates the aircraft, and a separation management component 68 of the air traffic control portion 60 performs separation management functions to manage and prevent conflicts to ensure safety of flight.
Although desirable results have been achieved using existing air traffic management systems, there may be room for improvement. For example, at times, a flight route may be planned non-optimally to avoid a congestion point or anticipated convective weather cells. Additionally, if that event does not materialize, or is only relevant for a short period of time, traffic flows and individual flights may operate less optimally than otherwise possible. Similarly, as wind patterns develop, certain trajectories of flight not in the original flight plan may become preferable from an efficiency standpoint.
Some efforts have been made to address such undesirable circumstances, including, for example, the “Direct To” tool developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the User Request Evaluation Tool developed by The Mitre Corporation of McLean, Va. Such existing systems and methods for air traffic management, however, are configured for use by air traffic controllers having a somewhat limited perspective, and are not particularly well-suited to enable user-preferred (e.g. airline requested) real-time flight trajectory revisions.